Sandpaper Letters

Sandpaper letters are a great way to help little hands learn to write letters.  They can also be used as flash cards, for practicing letter names and sounds, or for lots of other letter games!

We love our sandpaper letters from polliwog77! (I won them from a giveaway a couple years ago.)

But if you don't want to spend that much money on a set, you can make your own...here's one tutorial on how to do it.

Learning to write letters

Isaac has been able to write his name for a while, but he still prefers me to write the letter s.  I didn't understand exactly why until a few weeks ago I was reading about teaching children how to write letters.  Here's what I learned:

The letters of the alphabet can be separated into three groups that differ in writing difficulty. 

The easiest group are the straight line letters:

Next are the curve line letters:

And finally, the most challenging are the circle letters (or letters that have a circle, or most of one, in them):

And now I understand why s seems so scary for Isaac!  So we're taking it easy and not forcing any letter writing that he doesn't want to do.  I'm hoping that as his fine motor skills continue to improve he'll one day discover that he can easily write that tricky letter s.